Asia

An excellent post over at black and white cat blog (the reference is to former supreme leader Deng Xiaoping’s groundbreaking dictum that it “doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice,” a revolutionary idea in late seventies china). It’s about how corrupt local officials in the notorious province of Henan …

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It’s always a good idea to pay attention to pork, and I say that not just because it’s so tasty. In China pork is a leading economic indicator. It’s the most consumed meat, especially among the poor, and when prices have gone up over the past year consumers have squealed. The biggest complaint among foreigners and …

Ok. Quick. What are the least likely awards you can think of? People are too easy. “And the Nobel Peace Prize goes to…..George W.Bush!” How about cities? Civic Politeness to Hong Kong? Best food to Glasgow (where deep fried candy bars are a specialty)….Anyway, here’s a real one:
At the third Air Quality Conference (the …

For those who have a bottomless appetite, here’s our final word–I hope–on the wretched Kitty Hawk affair.

Guangdong province is about to reach another milestone. The GDP of the world’s factory surpassed that of Singapore in 1998, Hong Kong in 2003, and, by the end of this year, is expected to edge out Taiwan as well (though it still lags far behind South Korea). Since 1990, Guangdong’s growth has averaged 14.4% annually, according to a …

One of the more under-reported stories in China is the discontent that many students at second tier universities feel. Over the past couple of years, there have been several cases of unrest over issues that speak to the economic insecurity that many of China’s young people feel—particularly if they don’t go to elite universities …

So apparently President Bush and the White House China experts who advise him misundersood the Chinese Foreign Minister, who actually did not say there was a “misunderstanding” over the Kitty Hawk visit. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said yesterday that “This kind of report does not conform to facts.” So, the White …

Trend spotting in China is often a perilous exercise. The country is so big that you can easily pick a few cases to make one argument, then find a few more to make the opposite point. That’s especially true when considering political reform, where so much of the action is out of the public eye. Some new numbers on political arrests in …

So it was all just a simple misunderstanding. Case closed, right? According to the wires, China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told President Dubya at the White House Wednesday that the Kitty Hawk affair was just a mix up of some kind. No explanation of what that means or how the exact same “misunderstanding” happened a few days earlier. …

The Kitty Hawk affair is getting murkier and murkier. Senior U.S. admirals now reportedly say that the flip flopping by Chinese authorities on letting the aircraft carrier dock in Hong Kong was the second such incident this month. Earlier, two minesweepers were refused permision to shelter from an approaching storm and refuel. That is …

In his previous post, Simon notes that China will begin spending 1.35% of GDP on environmental protection and asks how much it will eventually cost to clean up China’s pollution mess. No one will really know the cost of course until it is actually cleaned up. (What would Donald Rumsfeld call that, a “known unknown?”) Wang Canfa, who runs …

A follow up to a previous post about the environment in China and the cost of a clean up. Well, here are some real numbers that show I may have been right and the government thinks it can throw money at the problem and solve it that way. The State Council announced Monday that it would spend about 1.35 pc of GDP annually for the next …